News and Events

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT) Title: Concord as Insatiable Agree Time: Thursday, April 24th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present an analysis of concord – nominal agreement in case and phi features – as insatiable Agree (e.g., Deal 2023, 2024; Clem and Deal 2024). On this […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:09 am

Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp and Ido Elhadad-Benbaji (MIT)Title: Structure matters: missing implicatures and their consequence for the theory of alternativesTime: Wednesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: A central component to theories of conversational implicature is the delimitation of the set of alternative sentences that could have been uttered, but were not. Yet there is considerable […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:06 am

Speaker: Philip Shushurin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) Title: How to do voice restructuring in a language without voice: Transitivity Concord in Chechen. Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The paper presents an analysis of a construction known as Transitivity Concord in Chechen. I argue that this construction presents a novel […]

Posted: April 21, 2025, 10:05 am

Speaker: Yasutada Sudo (UCL) Title: Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions Time: Friday, April 18th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: This is an attempt to explain the exceptional scope behavior of specific indefinites in terms of ‘dynamic presuppositions’—presuppositions with anaphoric content in addition to propositional content. It is also claimed that puzzling interpretive properties of […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:12 am

Speaker: Yasutada Sudo (UCL)   Title: Relative Atomicity Lecture 1: Absolute Atomicity and distributivity Lecture 2: Mass-count, distributivity, and classifiers in Relative Atomicity   Times:  Lecture 1: April 16, 2025: 12:30-2pm Lecture 2: April 17, 2025: 12:30-2pm   Location: 32-D461   Abstract: The standard model-theoretic approach to nominal number assumes that a model comes with […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:11 am

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT) Title: Cases are partially ordered: Evidence from Estonian Time: Thursday, April 17th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: Caha 2009 et seq. argues that cases are universally totally ordered: NOM < ACC < GEN < PAR < obliques, with obliques also totally ordered. Arguments for this include case syncretisms […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker:Oddur Snorrason (QMUL) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT) Title: How are Icelandic degree questions moving many phrases Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Icelandic, despite being a language which does not permit Left Branch Extraction in general, allows an exceptional way of forming degree questions in addition to the standard pied-piping structure, […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT) & Sixing Cui (Central China Normal University, Wuhan) Title: The replacement of Beijing Mandarin neutral tones in AABB reduplications: part 2 Time: Monday, April 14th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Earlier research (Cui 2012, 2021) suggests that when Mandarin disyllabic adjectives of the form AB such as [dàfang] 大方 ’generous’ […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:04 am

Congratulations to our colleague, Professor Emeritus S. Jay Keyser, who will be receiving the Wilbur Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement from his PhD alma mater, Yale University, this Fall!  Yale describes the award this way:   “The Wilbur Cross Medal, named in honor of former Graduate School Dean and Governor of Connecticut Wilbur Lucius Cross, […]

Posted: April 14, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA) Title: A typology of word prominence marking and intonational tone types and functions Time: Friday, April 11th, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In the framework of Autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980, Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986, Ladd 1996/2008), tones have two functions: prominence marking and boundary marking. Prominence of a […]

Posted: April 7, 2025, 10:12 am

Speaker: Zhouyi Sun and Peter Grishin (MIT)Title: Ordering postsyntactic operations within domainsTime: Thursday, April 10th, 5pm - 6pmLocation: 32-D769Abstract: In Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, et seq.), a number of postsyntactic morphological operations are proposed, such as Impoverishment, Fission, and Vocabulary Insertion (henceforth VI), among others, raising the question of how these operations are […]

Posted: April 7, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker: J. Cooper Roberts (MIT) Title: Honorification as omnivorous Agree in Kikai Amami Time: Tuesday, April 8th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Japanese (Japonic > Yamato) is well-known for its complex systems of honorification, both of clausal arguments (sonkeigo) and discourse participants (teineigo). However, the honorific systems of the related Ryukyuan languages have received […]

Posted: April 7, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (MIT)Title: Strengthening under quantifiers: Gap projection rules vs. supervaluationismTime: Wednesday, April 9th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In line with the goal of moving to a more informal, interactive format for the LFRG, this will not be a talk presenting results, but an attempt to start a discussion and figure out the theoretical […]

Posted: April 7, 2025, 10:06 am

On Sunday, April 6, we were excited to host PhPhoNE 2025. The event featured multiple presentations by graduate students from institutions across the Northeast, covering a diverse range of topics in phonology and phonetics. You can find the detailed program here. Our third-year PhD student Juan Cancel presented his work, entitled “A Reanalysis of Syllabic […]

Posted: April 7, 2025, 10:05 am

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT) Title: Bi-dialectal speakers store a sound category they never produce: An investigation of an ongoing merger in Modern Hebrew Time: Thursday, April 3rd, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Bi-dialectal speakers typically end up producing the more prestigious dialect within their community and showing a processing advantage for words when spoken […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:10 am

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw/MIT) Title: On the origin of cases Time: Tuesday, April 1st, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Do grammatical cases exist, or are they just an epiphenomenon, a perceived result of flagging an NP with an additional category (Pesetsky and Torrego 2001, Pesetsky 2013) or with an additional set of φ features […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:08 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Non-Optimization and Locality in Phonology Time: Monday, March 31st, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Drawing on recent proposals from Storme & Otilien (2022) and Lahrouchi & Ulfsbjorninn (2024), I discuss various linguistic patterns of Haitian Creole (HC) to illustrate how different grammatical architectures account for “null alternations” and apparent […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:07 am

The 22nd annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference was held at Montreal, and Mont Tremblant, Quebec, Canada from 27 March to 1 April 2025. Our first-year PhD student Heidi Durresi presented her work with others (Authors: Linghao Kong, Heidi Durresi, Lu Mi, and Nir Shavit) at the conference, entitled “Presynaptic input synchrony at scale”! […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:06 am

Our sixth-year PhD student Margaret Wang was an invited speaker at the 3rd workshop on Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes (CHAMP3) held at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from March 28 to 29, 2025. Her talk was entitled “Politeness as a part-time vocation for vacuous linguistic forms”, and here is the abstract: This talk will describe […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:05 am

The 47th meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) was held at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Göttingen on March 25-28, 2025. Here are the presentations made by current students, faculty and alumni: Yiannis Katochoritis (2nd year): If Distributivity is Variable Binding, Scope Reconstruction must be Syntactic (abstract) Gianluca […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:04 am

Our colleague Norvin Richards had not one but two papers published last week! The first, entitled “Reconstructing Stress in Wôpanâak”, appeared in the International Journal of American Linguistics. Here is the abstract: Wôpanâak (also called Wampanoag, Massachusett, Natick), the original language of much of eastern Massachusetts, is known to us from a variety of seventeenth, […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:01 am

Norvin’s second paper to appear last week is entitled “Finding something to lean on”, and was published in Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America.  Here’s the abstract: Phrases in a number of syntactic contexts are required, in a variety of languages, to end in their heads. This article offers a unified theory […]

Posted: March 31, 2025, 10:00 am

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics 14 held at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Some of our current faculty colleague and almuni gave invited talks: Shigeru Miyagawa: The Treetop Structure in Asian Languages Lisa Cheng (PhD 1991)[Leiden University]: The structure of verbalization Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000)[University […]

Posted: March 24, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Runqi Tan (MIT) Title: The role of perceptual contrast in tone inventory Time: Monday, March 17th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Theoretically, there are 2366 possible types of two- to five-tone inventories. However, a survey of 63 two- to five-tone languages reveals only 12 attested tone inventories. This discrepancy suggests that tone inventories […]

Posted: March 17, 2025, 10:04 am

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (ZAS Berlin, MIT) Title: Pragmatic constraints on morphosyntactic organization: A case study on homogeneity and imprecision Time: Thursday, March 20th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Across unrelated languages, there is a containment asymmetry between definite plurals and all-type plural universal quantifiers (UQs) — for instance, the surface form all the books […]

Posted: March 17, 2025, 10:02 am

Our faculty colleague Shigeru Miyagawa recently published an article titled “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago” in Frontiers in Psychology on March 11. You can read the abstract below and access the article here: Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens, based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, […]

Posted: March 17, 2025, 10:01 am

Postdoctoral associate and alum Eunsun Jou (PhD 2024) gave an invited talk entitled “Case-marked adverbials and the timing of case evaluation” at the Comparative Syntax, Semantics and Language Acquisition Workshop held on March 8-9 at the Nanzan University Center for Linguistics. A summary of the talk is provided below: While structural cases such as the […]

Posted: March 17, 2025, 10:00 am

  Speaker: Edward Flemming (MIT) - Joint work with Giorgio Magri (CNRS, SFL, Paris 8) Title: Strict domination in probabilistic phonology Time: Monday, March 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Labov (1969) hypothesized that rates of application of variable phonological processes obey an intriguing generalization that we dub the Strict Domination Generalizationː Where multiple […]

Posted: March 10, 2025, 10:04 am

On March 1st 2025, the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) was held at University of Southern California. Our current student Bergül Soykan (3rd year student) presented a poster entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. You can read the abstract here, and a shorter version […]

Posted: March 10, 2025, 10:02 am

On 1st March 2025, the 3rd Theoretical Approaches to Ryukyuan Languages conference (ThARL3) was hosted by University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Cooper Roberts (2nd year student) presented a paper entitled “Another way to allocutively agree in Japonic?”, which compares and contrasts addressee honorification in Japanese and Shuri Okinawan. He suggests a way […]

Posted: March 10, 2025, 10:01 am

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley) Title: Pseudo-de re, generalized Time: Thursday, March 6th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Let’s call an element of an attitude report “exportable” if it can be replaced with a co-extensional element salva veritate. In linguistic semantics, the long-standing analysis of exportable terms in attitude reports runs on acquaintance: the […]

Posted: March 3, 2025, 11:02 am

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley) Title: Case sensitivity reflects case structure: agreement, extraction, and clitics Time: Friday, March 7th, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: A variety of syntactic phenomena seem to be conditioned by morphological case (an effect known variously as ‘case discrimination’, ‘case targeting’, ‘case opacity’, or simply ‘case sensitivity’). In this talk I […]

Posted: March 3, 2025, 11:01 am

Speaker: Michela Ippolito (University of Toronto) Title: What makes rhetorical questions rhetorical Time: Friday 02/28 at 3:30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The question of what is special about rhetorical questions has been subject to debate for quite some time. One prominent view is that what makes rhetorical questions rhetorical is that they, unlike canonical questions, bear […]

Posted: February 24, 2025, 11:30 am

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT) Title: Referendum on nominal licensing Time: Tuesday, February 25th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Come one, come all to a very informal discussion about nominal licensing! When I say “nominal licensing”, I’m referring to one aspect of debates about case theory, namely whether case theory is about the distribution of […]

Posted: February 24, 2025, 11:05 am

Speaker: Omri Doron, Danny Fox, and Jad Wehbe (MIT) Title: Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation Time: Thursday, February 27th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Sudo (2012) provides important evidence that trivalent (or partial) semantics is not rich enough to account for certain presupposition projection phenomena. Specifically, he observes that presuppositions triggered by different lexical […]

Posted: February 24, 2025, 11:02 am

Our colleague Danny Fox presented joint work with students Omri Doron (6th year) and Jad Wehbe (5th year) at a colloquium at UMass Amherst, entitled “Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation”. You can read the abstract here.

Posted: February 24, 2025, 11:01 am

Speaker: Idan Landau (Tel Aviv University) Title: Detecting, Constraining and Interpreting Silent Structure: Insights from Argument Ellipsis in Hebrew” Time: Friday, February 21st, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In this talk I examine classical and current issues in the theory of ellipsis through the prism of Argument Ellipsis (AE) in Hebrew, a productive process that offers […]

Posted: February 18, 2025, 11:30 am

  Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University) Title: Large language models and human linguistic cognition Time: Thursday, February 20, 2025: 12:30 - 2pm Location: 32-461 Abstract: Several recent publications in cognitive science have made the suggestion that the performance of current Large Language Models (LLMs) challenges arguments that linguists use to support their theories (in […]

Posted: February 18, 2025, 11:29 am

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University) Title: Gaps, doublets, and rational learning Time: Tuesday, February 18th, 5pm - 6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Inflectional gaps (??forgoed/??forwent) and doublets (✓dived/✓dove) can seem surprising in light of common assumptions about morphology and learning. Perhaps understandably, morphologists have troubled themselves with such cases (especially with gaps) and have offered […]

Posted: February 18, 2025, 11:04 am

Our Breakstone Speaker series visitor (and last week’s colloquium speaker), Roni Katzir will be giving a mini-course this week as well: Title: Can artificial neural networks become more rational? Times: Class 1: February 18, 2025: 1 - 2pm  Class 2: February 19, 2025: 1 - 2pm  Location: 32-461      Since the mid-1980s, artificial neural networks […]

Posted: February 18, 2025, 10:56 am

Our colleague Elise Newman was an invited speaker at a workshop about Locality across the board in the pun-inviting locality of Nice.  Her talk was entitled “The locality of subcategorization: a case for underspecified category”, and here is the abstract for it: This talk is concerned with the selectional mechanism that underlies verb-argument pairs like (1). a. […]

Posted: February 18, 2025, 10:55 am

We are delighted to announce the publication in Natural Language Semantics of  (third year PhD student) Johanna Alstott’s paper “First and last as superlatives of before and after”. Congratulations Johanna!! Here’s the abstract: First and last have been variously described as ordinals, superlatives, or both. These descriptions are generally not accompanied by extensive argumentation, and those who label first and last as superlatives do not present and argue for […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:10 am

On January 28th, 2025, our six-year student Omri Doron gave an invited talk at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled “Presupposing multiplicity: another look at the semantics of plural marking”. Abstract can be seen here: Plural indefinites in argument position give rise to so-called multiplicity inferences, which are neutralized in downward-entailing environments: (1) a. Mary owns […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:09 am

Sixth-year graduate student Omri Doron gave a talk at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on January 23rd, 2025, with the title “Revisiting pronominal copulas”.  Here is the abstract: Hebrew nonverbal sentences sometimes contain what looks like a pronoun between the subject and the predicate (“Pron”), which agrees with the subject (1). It is a part […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:08 am

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University) Title: On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus Time: Friday, February 14th, 3:30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. I will suggest that we abandon this anaphoric view. Instead […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:05 am

Adam Albright gave a talk at the Deparmental Seminar of Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Chinese University of Hong Kong, on January 21st, 2025, with the title “Complex Restrictions from Simple Constraints”. You can read the abstract here: A recurring finding in the past 30 years has been that phonological restrictions that are categorical […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:05 am

Our alum Heejong Ko (PhD 2005) gave the opening remarks at the 1st SNU Linguistics Symposium on January 10 and 11, 2025. Third-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. A brief abstract is given below and you can read the longer version here. This study investigates […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:04 am

Speaker: Ben Flickstein and Ezer Rasin (Tel Aviv)Title: Towards a phonological feature system for birdsongTime: Monday, February 10th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: A foundational assumption in theoretical phonology is that phonological representations are built from distinctive features, typically stated in articulatory terms. Those features define natural classes that phonological processes typically apply to or are […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:04 am

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Philadelphia Marriott Downtown from 1-9 January. Many of our current students, faculty, and visitors gave talks and posters: Adèle Hénot-Mortier (6th year): On the QuD-dependence of conditionals Eunsun Jou (Postdoc; PhD 2024): Korean nonactive suffixes HI and eci […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:03 am

Course announcements in this post: More Advanced Syntax (24.955) Topics in Syntax (24.956) Topics in Semantics (MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R) Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981) 24.955: More Advanced Syntax Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou Wednesdays, 10am-1pm Room: 32-D461 This class is a requirement for the syntax specialization and strongly recommended for those interested in the syntax-semantics interface. It explores many topics, all […]

Posted: February 10, 2025, 11:00 am

January at MIT is a quiet month, without regular classes and regularly scheduled events — so you might not hear from us again until the new semester begins in February 2025.  Of course, we will report any interesting events as they happen, even before the start of the new semester.  Meanwhile, we wish you a […]

Posted: December 23, 2024, 11:40 am

The MIT Linguistics community actively participated in the Amsterdam Colloquium 2024 held at University of Amsterdam on December 18-20. Our current students and faculty gave the following talks: Adèle Hénot-Mortier (6th year): Scalarity, information structure and relevance in varieties of Hurford Conditionals Jad Wehbe (5th year), Kate Kinnaird (Lab Manager), Martin Hackl (Faculty; PhD 2001): […]

Posted: December 23, 2024, 11:00 am

On December 17th, Enrico Flor brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled Coarse Modality!  The dissertation documents the existence of what Enrico calls “coarse modality”, drawing mostly on Italian data.  Much of the focus is on reducing apparent polysemy to an underspecified meaning that interacts with other modal expressions.  The central theoretical argument of the […]

Posted: December 23, 2024, 10:30 am

On December 7, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT organized a celebratory workshop in honor of our colleague, semanticist Irene Heim, professor emerita of Linguistics —  on the occasion of her having been awarded the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize (jointly with Hans Kamp) which we reported earlier here.  As we noted at the […]

Posted: December 9, 2024, 12:00 pm

Speaker: Heidi Durresi (MIT) Title: Hauser & Hughto (2020) on contextual faithfulness constraints for opacity Time: Monday, December 9th, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: For this week’s Phonology Circle, I’ll be presenting a recent paper by Hauser and Hughto which explores the use of contextual faithfulness constraints to analyze opacity in parallel Optimality Theory and Harmonic […]

Posted: December 9, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences & MIT) Title: Exponence of stacked feature bundles: Evidence from Slavic numerals Time: Tuesday, December 10, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: A number of languages exhibit overt case stacking, and it has been argued that other languages also make use of case stacking, but with just one […]

Posted: December 9, 2024, 11:00 am

This week continues a tradition that began in 2015: our tenth joint colloquium shared by the Linguistics and Philosophy halves of our department: Speaker: Dorit Abusch & Mats Rooth (Cornell University) Title: Possible worlds semantics for film and the problem of over-informative embedding Time: Friday, December 6th, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In the superlinguistics program, […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:30 am

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT) Title: Augmenting Vocabulary Insertion: From Monotonic to Output-driven Time: Thursday, December 5, 5-6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: It has been argued that *ABA in root suppletion patterns can be reduced to the principle of monotonicity: given a partial order among feature bundles, if two feature bundles x […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:26 am

Speaker: Keely New (MIT) Title: On the apparent lack of multiple wh-questions in Jakarta Indonesian Time: Tuesday, December 3, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: It has been claimed that in certain languages (e.g. Italian, Irish, and Somali), it is impossible to form questions that include more than one wh-constituent. This is surprising because under […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:02 am

Speaker: Eyal Marco (Joint work with Radan Nasrallah and Ezer Rasin), Tel Aviv University. Title: Phonological derivations are not harmonically improving: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic Time: Monday, December 2, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Opacity poses a well-known challenge for the classical version of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), which applies phonological processes in […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:01 am

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT) Title: A typological argument against lexical cumulativity Time: Wednesday, December 4, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this talk, I develop and motivate a new implementation of an old idea about the contrast between acceptable Hurford disjunctions (HDs) like (i) and unacceptable ones like (ii) (e.g. Gazdar 1979) — the […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Patrick Juola (Duquesne University) Title: Forensic Linguistics: Casework and Empirical Demonstrations Time: Thursday, December 5th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Forensic linguistics is a relatively undersubscribed subfield of forensic science, which focuses on developing legal conclusions from linguistic evidence. In this talk, we discuss the theory and practice of “authorship attribution” (aka “styometry”) […]

Posted: December 2, 2024, 11:00 am

MIT Linguistics community participated in Formal Diachronic Semantics 9 hosted by Università di Bologna on November 28-29! The following talks were presented by our current students and alumni: Ruoan Wang (6th year): Variable preservation of honorificity after repluralization: A diachronic typology Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002)[Université Paris VIII]: Affix conglutination as allosemy in a complex affix

Posted: November 30, 2024, 11:10 am

MIT Linguistics mourns the passing of our colleague Jim Harris, well-known to generations of MIT students over three decades for his wisdom and insight into the morphology, phonology, and syntax of Spanish (and Catalan) — and thus into language itself. Sad news for the field and for our community.  His long-time colleague Jay Keyser writes […]

Posted: November 25, 2024, 12:00 pm

Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (Queen Mary University of London) Title: Subtraction in the Distribution of Auxiliaries Time: Tuesday, November 26, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Auxiliaries are known to arise either (i) with a certain inflectional category (Additive pattern), or (ii) in the combination of such categories (Overflow pattern; Bjorkman 2011). This talk is about […]

Posted: November 25, 2024, 11:03 am

  Speaker: Sixing Cui (Central China Normal University, Wuhan; MIT Visiting Scholar) & Michael Kenstowicz (MIT) Title: Searching for Phonetic Correlates of Velar Palatalization Time: Monday, November 25, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Earlier research (Cui 2012, 2021) suggests that when Mandarin disyllabic adjectives of the form AB such as [dàfang] 大方’generous’ are reduplicated to AABB […]

Posted: November 25, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (QMUL) Title: Pseudo-ABA patterns in pronominal morphology (Middleton 2021) Time: Thursday, November 21, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: I‘ll be presenting Middleton‘s (2021) paper on the pseudo-ABA patterns of morphology found in pronominal forms. Apparent ABA patterns in languages like Babanki, Malayalam, Yoruba and Tok Pisin challenge proposed containment relationships for […]

Posted: November 18, 2024, 12:00 pm

Speaker: David Adger (Queen Mary University of London) Title: Mereological Syntax and Island Locality Time: Friday, November 22nd, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: The problems with Bare Phrase Structure theory are well known, especially the issues surrounding copies and labelling, both of which require supplementary theories which have their own problems. Similarly, the stipulations that need […]

Posted: November 18, 2024, 11:10 am

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger (MIT & University of Vienna) Title: Is composite [Ā/A] probing extended A-movement? Time: Thursday, 21 November, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In the last ten years of syntactic research, composite [A’/A] probes have been employed to account for a variety of unrelated phenomena: i) topicalization, focalization, wh-extraction, relativization with A-properties (van […]

Posted: November 18, 2024, 11:03 am

Speaker: Norvin Richards (MIT) Title: Agreement by proxy, improper movement, and Passamaquoddy long-distance agreement Time: Tuesday, November 19, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: A substantial literature (Butt 1993, 1995, Bhatt 2005, Legate 2005, Baker and Willie 2010…) entertains the idea that in some cases in which two heads in the clausal spine (call them […]

Posted: November 18, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Amy Li (MIT) Title: Searching for Phonetic Correlates of Velar Palatalization Time: Monday, November 18th, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: In this presentation, I will discuss a collection of experiments (completed, ongoing, and proposed) that relate to the following central question: what phonetic properties set apart a language undergoing velar palatalization from a language not […]

Posted: November 18, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Vina Tsakali (University of Crete) Title: Desires in (child) Greek Time: Thursday, November 14th, 12:30pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The study investigates how children acquire the meaning of sentences expressing desires and wishes. In the literature desires are described as pursuable attitudes in the actual world, while wishes express unattainable desires. Crucially, wishing […]

Posted: November 11, 2024, 11:08 am

Speaker: Margaret Wang (MIT) Title: Variable preservation of honorificity after repluralization: a diachronic typology Time:  Wednesday, November 13th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: Given the cross-linguistically widespread recruitment of plural for politeness, repluralization is also widespread. This talk aims to address two puzzles about repluralization. First, given that there exist other proxies for politeness […]

Posted: November 11, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Jason Shaw Title: Lecture #1: Modelling phonetic variation with the neural dynamics of movement preparation Time: Friday, November 13th, 1-2:30pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: A Dynamic Neural Field (DNF) is a formal object developed within systems neuroscience with the intention of giving a theoretical foundation to the notions of cooperation and competition between neural populations […]

Posted: November 11, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Jason Shaw (Yale) Title: Is phonological grammar movement preparation? Time: Friday, November 15th, 3.30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In the Dynamic Field Theory of movement preparation, intentions to move are inputs to Dynamic Neural Fields (DNFs) representing the metric dimensions of the movement (Erlhagen & Schöner, 2002). Although initially developed to explain properties of eye […]

Posted: November 11, 2024, 11:00 am

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT) Title: Metrical Incoherence or Opacity: A Stratal OT Analysis of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan Time: Thursday, November 4th, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract: The topic of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan (Wagner-Nagy 2018) has been the subject of much discussion in the literature since it has been considered as an example of metrical […]

Posted: November 4, 2024, 11:06 am

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT) Title: A typological argument against lexical cumulativity Time: Wednesday, November 6, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: In this talk, I develop and motivate a new implementation of an old idea about the contrast between acceptable Hurford disjunctions (HDs) like (i) and unacceptable ones like (ii) (e.g. Gazdar 1979) — the […]

Posted: November 4, 2024, 11:05 am

Speaker: Núria Bosch (University of Cambridge) Title: Not all topics are equal: syntactic complexity and its effect on the acquisition of left-peripheral structures Time: Tuesday, November 5, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Approaches to the acquisition of functional categories, particularly maturational approaches, havetypically focused on theorising putatively universal aspects of development, e.g., universally ‘delayed’ […]

Posted: November 4, 2024, 11:03 am

MIT folks presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2024) which took place November 1-3 at Rutgers University. The following talks and poster were given by our students and visitors:  Current students and visitors: Alma Frischoff (1st year), Ezer Rasin (Visiting professor, PhD 2018): Unattested opaque interactions are Input Strictly Local (abstract) Bingzi […]

Posted: November 4, 2024, 11:00 am

It’s that time again!  In anticipation of Halloween, the department was devoted to pumpkins and the carving thereof on October 30:  our annual Linguistics pumpkin carve.

Posted: November 4, 2024, 10:45 am

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT) Title: *ABA and Successive Containment Reexamined, or How to Assemble Russian Dolls Properly Time: Thursday, November 7, 5-6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: The last decade has witnessed the success of vocabulary item-based approaches to morphology in accounting for the typological gap in suppletion or syncretism patterns dubbed […]

Posted: November 4, 2024, 10:07 am

Second-year student Cooper Roberts presented a paper on October 25 at an online workshop devoted to Puzzles of Agreement: Syntactic, Semantic, and Psycholinguistic perspectives. His talk, entitled “Half of an answer: on agreement with fraction partitives”, proposed an analysis of some puzzling agreement patterns in English nominals like one-third of the students, and suggests a […]

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:20 am

Congratulations to Michael Kenstowicz, whose article surveying (and entitled) “Generative phonology” has just been published in the second edition of Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics edited by Keith Brown (Elsevier)!

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:15 am

Speaker: Kyle Johnson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Title: Presupposing Principle A Time: Thursday, 31 October 2024, 12:30-2:00PM Location: 32-D461 Abstract: We examine an argument that Principle A effects derive from a presupposition that is introduced when reflexives exist. We sketch a way of doing that which places the presupposition trigger at the A-probe where possible […]

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Nathan Sanders (University of Toronto) Title: Effective teaching in phonetics and phonology Time: Friday, November 1, 3:30-5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: In this talk, I offer some reflections from my own experience concerning how instructors can be more effective when teaching phonetics and phonology. First, I discuss ideas to consider when developing course content, such […]

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT) Title: Why Derive Uniqueness of Definites from Contextual Contradiction? A Case from Bengali Time: Wednesday, October 30, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This is Part II of the two-part talk that began last week. In last week’s talk, I showed the theoretical possibility of deriving the uniqueness presupposition of definites […]

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:00 am

Phonology Circle on Monday, October 28, will have two practice presentations for the upcoming AMP conference: Time: Monday, October 28 5pm-7pm Location: 32-D831 Speaker #1: Bingzi Yu (MIT) Title: Learners’ generalization of alternation patterns from ambiguous data Abstract: A key question in the study of phonological acquisition is how learners acquire a pattern from data […]

Posted: October 28, 2024, 10:00 am

We are delighted to announce that a paper entitled  ”Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” by 5th-year student Giovanni Roversi has just been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.  Congratulations, Giovanni! Here’s the abstract: This paper argues that possession is syntactically category-flexible. While it is clear that in many languages possession is […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:32 am

The MIT Linguistics community and its alums were well-represented at NELS 55, hosted by Yale University on October 17 & 18. Our distinguished alum Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015) of Queen Mary University of London, was one of the invited speakers, and spoke about “The cycle within a syllable: The role of the vP phase […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:30 am

Our colleague Michael Kenstowicz is the author or coauthor of three separate articles in the just-published Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, from Oxford University Press: “Vowel harmony in pre-Generative phonology”, “Vowel harmony in Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages”, and “Palatal harmony” (with Charles Kisseberth).  Our most harmonic congratulations!!

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:08 am

MIT Press has just announced the publication of a monograph by our newest faculty colleague Elise Newman, entitled When Arguments Merge, in its Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series.  The book presents “a novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families” […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:05 am

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT) Title: Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka Time: Tuesday, October 22, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Austronesian Malagasy and Nilotic Dinka Bor share non-trivial parallels: (i) an Austronesian voice/pivot system, where one (any) DP argument of the clause is promoted to a syntactically and discourse-wise prominent pivot […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:05 am

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT) Title: On two types of aspectual coercion and before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing Time: Thursday, October 2412:30 PM Location: 32-D461 Abstract: As originally observed by Anscombe (1964) and Heinamäki (1974), certain sentences with before and after are prima facie ambiguous between a strong reading and a weak reading. There is an entailment […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:01 am

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT) Title: Deriving Uniqueness of Definites from Contradiction Time: Wednesday, October 23, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: This is Part I of a two-part talk. In this Part I, I explore a hypothetical: what if definites are not that different from indefinites syntactically? More specifically, extending an idea of Omri Doron’s, […]

Posted: October 21, 2024, 10:00 am

Dear friends of MIT Linguistics, Sadly, we have been on hiatus for some weeks.  We are excited to share the news that will now be publishing a number of backdated issues to catch up with all we’ve been doing at MIT Linguistics in the meantime — and that we are now back! That said, January […]

Posted: October 14, 2024, 10:05 am

Speaker: Maya Honda, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, and Lorenzo Pinton (MIT) Title: MIT Linguistics reaches out: Making the field’s biggest questions accessible to its youngest stakeholders Time: Thursday, October 17, 12:30 PM Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Language is essential to being human and to understanding ourselves. Yet, Linguistics, the science of language, is not part of […]

Posted: October 14, 2024, 10:00 am

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT) Title: Sulemana (2024) on Passives without Morphology Time: Thursday, October 10th, 5pm - 6pm Location: 32-D769 Abstract: For this week’s Morphun, I’m looking forward to presenting a cool recent paper by an alum of our department, Dr. Abdul-Razak Sulemana, who investigated passive constructions without morphology in Buli (Gur, Ghana).  Despite lacking […]

Posted: October 7, 2024, 10:10 am

Speaker: Chelsea Tang (MIT)Title: Overapplication in Reduplication in Gikuyu: Evidence for Back-Copying?Time: Monday, October 7th, 5pm - 6:30pmLocation: 32-D831Abstract: Back-copying is an overapplication phenomenon where the reduplicant creates an environment for a phonological process to apply, after which the base “back-copies” from the reduplicant. Many scholars (McCarthy, Kimper, and Mullin 2012; Kiparsky 2010; Inkelas and […]

Posted: October 7, 2024, 10:04 am

Speaker: Alma Frischoff and Ezer Rasin (MIT and Tel Aviv University)Title: On the absence of crucially-simultaneous phonological interactions in natural languageTime: Thursday, October 10th, 12:30pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Theories of phonology should be able to generate attested types of interactions between phonological processes – including opaque interactions – and at the same time explain why […]

Posted: October 7, 2024, 10:02 am